November 1st was the last time I posted anything on Twitter. Since then this blog has been my home online.
A couple of days ago Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote a thank you letter to Evan Williams. It was a powerful piece and got me thinking. While Twitter still frustrates me in many ways it nonetheless remains an incredible community and a remarkable publishing tool. 1 It’s simple, fast, and available everywhere.
Recently I kept a Twitter folder in my RSS reader of a group of people who I wanted to follow. This felt like a total hack. Similarly, while some people have taken to blogging more, the reality is that a ton (the majority?) of conversation still happens on Twitter. I want to be a part of that again. Conversation is integral to keeping the mind fresh and churning.
I’m setting some ground rules to keep things sane. I plan to follow fewer people. Nothing against the 100 or so people I unfollowed last night. It’s just that I only have so many brain cycles in a day. I’m currently at about 150. That feels like a good number to me for now. Maybe it’ll go up a bit but probably not too much.
Most importantly, anything I post on Twitter will be published here. My blog is my home online. When I publish content I want to bring it into that home, not relegate it to a rented storage locker out back.
I’ll also get my tweet archive back up and running. Even with Twitter, though, if it’s important enough to post then I should be blogging about it. As Anil Dash said, if you didn’t blog it, it didn’t happen.
Notes:
- I still dream of the loosely coupled network Dave Winer talks about ↩
Welcome back.
I understand the frustration and overwhelming brain overload. Twitter is about as plugged in as you can be the pulse of the internet, so you’re always going to have extraneous Charlie Sheen-esque trends to ignore. But I agree that it’s undeniable that’s where a lot of amazing conversations happen. I got my current job through Twitter and the community of young designers I have “met” is invaluable. Don’t feel bad about culling the people you follow way down, not everyone (myself included) contributes things worth reading.
Thanks! I’d missed the job switch, Periscopic looks like a sweet place to be.
Glad to have you back in the short-form watercooleresque conversation space! You (and Anil) are right about the important stuff happening inlaces that have staying power (blog posts), but the conversation stream has its place, and can be an incredibly powerful bootstrapping force. Some of the greatest things we (humanity) have done started out as napkin sketches, not clean drawings on archival vellum… but it’s a sad day when everything we do is written on paper designed to wipe our faces. We need both the convenient crap and the robust good stuff, with good interplay between the two.
Well said, Matt. It’s the interplay between the two that I’m hoping to reconnect with.